


TTL KIRKWALL STATION

by Mikkeneko



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Future, Canon-Typical Violence, Contest Entry, Fade to Black, Hawke/Anders 2017 Fic Olympics, M/M, everybody's got a computer in their brain, mages are hackers sorta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 06:51:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11099175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: Garrett Amell -- codename Hawke, the most infamous hacker on Kirkwall Station -- runs across a tired-looking drifter being harassed by local law enforcement. As a random act of kindness he decides to intervene -- a decision that will change both their lives.Written for the 2017 Hawke/Anders Fic Olympics, for the prompt "Justice."





	TTL KIRKWALL STATION

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: TTL ("Time To Live") is a setting in networking protocol that indicates how long a computer will retain a packet of network data. When the TTL limit is reached, the data will be lost.
> 
> I'm aware that 30th century deep-space computer networks will probably not use Windows. Consider it a translation convention.  
>  

 

 

Kirkwall Station was a city with no planet, a colony with no sun. Like so many of the other deep-space stations it had been built for its proximity to the Rift, not for any local planetary real estate. It sat on the crossing of two major routes, within a few days real-space travel to wealthy and populous inhabited star-systems, and that cross-traffic generated more than enough revenue to maintain a thriving full-time spaceport. Kirkwall hung in the deep blackness of space, lit by no sun but its own excesses, while the wealth of the galaxy spun and ebbed around it.

Not that the immense wealth that flowed through Kirkwall meant that everyone who lived on the station shared in that wealth. Apart from the cartel and shipline owners Kirkwall also sheltered a huge workforce of shipyard and transit crew members, those who worked to move the cargo from the deep crawlers coming out of the Rift onto the cargo ships to take them on to their destination. Kirkwall was also the last stop for a number of transients whose money ran out mid-voyage; stellar law forbade dumping unwanted passengers and stowaways out of airlocks, but stranding them on Kirkwall Station, it was said, was nearly the same thing.

And hackers. Kirkwall Station was also the home to a thriving, unlicensed hacker community. It was the presence of the nearby rift that made it so. Everywhere else in the galaxy, signal was reduced to the crawl of light-speed; the rift transported messages from station to station with no such barrier at all. Waypoint stations such as Kirkwall served as buzzing, thrumming homes for those who took the universal computer network on their own terms.

What Hawke did was illegal, technically. Just having the brainware modifications that allowed him to play havoc with the safe, humdrum everyday noise of the network was highly suspicious (although there was a legitimate use for them to be found in the network security offices of the big cartels.) Anyone outside of that was a suspect, but the local law enforcement on Kirkwall had learned to leave the hacker community alone. Harassment from the law enforcement inevitably drew swift, forceful, and immensely expensive retaliation from the rest of the hacker community; in return, if one of their own did cross the line from irreverent defiance to true malicious harm, they were just as quick to turn him out.

Hawke had a good relationship with the local head of network security on Kirkwall, Aveline Vallen; for all she pretended irritation whenever forced to deal with Hawke and his antics, she had always covered for him.

He strolled along the colonnade, his view of the physical world -- unimpressive as it was, bleak and utilitarian -- superimposed with a colorful overlay of data. Signs, labels, flashing indicators, auras and decorations all as immaterial as smoke.

Among the projections would normally be a whole bevy of advertisements -- billboards both still and video, flashing and blaring for his attention with carefully custom-selected keywords based on his buying habits. At the moment, he had them blocked, with only a few still icons to mark the place they would normally be. It took a special hack to block them, since technically doing so was illegal on Kirkwall station.

The official rationale was that blocking the advertisements would also result in cutting off emergency broadcast frequencies, but everyone knew that was only a pretense; the real reason was that the advertisers had far more money than the civilians. In Kirkwall's government, as with most of the deep-space stations, money was all that mattered.

Hawke wasn't worried about getting caught. Hell, if the truce he had brokered with the station's political powers ever broke down, he'd have a lot more on his plate to deal with than a few minor video blocking misdemeanors.

Shutting out the intrusive, often offensive advertisements freed up so much space and attention for other things; Hawke moved through a swirling cloud of data, tapping into channels from every layer of station life. It would have been easy to get lost, overstimulated, drowned in the sea of information, but he had years of practice in sorting through it, attending to the important threads and letting the rest flow around him.

A buzz on the local police channels caught his attention, and Hawke altered his course. Something seemed to be going on in a nearby cross-corridor, a concatenation of symbols and signals that indicated an arrest in progress, and that was as good as a glowing red flag for Hawke. He turned the corner into one of the maintenance tunnels -- wide, poorly insulated, dimly lit and drafty, they nonetheless tended to accumulate their own population of vagrants. There were only so many places on Kirkwall for the dispossessed to physically go, and anything that was relatively dry, well ventilated, and out of the sight of the station population worked as a lure.

Every few days the patrollers went through and rounded up the vagrants, and that seemed to be what was happening now -- Hawke had come on a shake-up in progress. A tall, bulky man in a Station Patrol uniform had a power-gloved grip on another man's upper arm, shaking him for emphasis in time with his words as his quarry did his best to lean back out of his range.

There was little doubt that the man being shaken down was indeed one of Kirkwall's many vagrants; his clothes were dirty and untidy, beard unshaven, hair hanging down in limp and tired tangles around his face. He stared at the deck's friction matting, mostly, while the patrolman delivered his litany of abuse and threats. Only once did he glance up to look his assailant in the face, but in that one piercing moment Hawke caught a glimpse of eyes as bright and hot as molten gold.

In that moment, he made up his mind.

"What's all this, then?" Hawke said affably, strolling up on the scene. 

The patroller gave him a scowl, half-obscured behind his faceplate. "Nothing that concerns you, citizen," he snapped, not giving up his grip on the vagrant's arm. It was hard to identify him through the faceplate -- that was half the point of the faceplate, after all -- but Hawke read the RFID tags on his armor as belonging to C. S. Rutherford, Templar enforcer. Not one of Hawke's favorite people, nor his favorite factions, even on the pit of warring snakes that Kirkwall sometimes turned into. 

While the patroller was distracted, the vagrant managed a half-shrug half-wriggle that loosed him from the gauntlet-clad grip, and without seeming to take a step he'd somehow managed to move out of immediate arm's reach. "Oh, sure. Just another day in a totalitarian police state, nothing out of the ordinary," he drawled. 

Hawke decided off the bat that he liked the man's cheek. "Is there seriously so little going on right now on Kirkwall Station that you're reduced to harassing the homeless?" he asked the patroller. Bringing up the incident feed in his mind's eye, he quickly searched through it for news. "There's a mugging going on right now outside a restaurant in Sector VI  _ and _  a domestic hostage situation up in Hightown; do you think your commander would really rather have you wasting your time on a harmless vagrant than actually taking care of paying customers?"

He caught the scowl even through the faceplate. "This man is not harmless," he snapped, and made another grab for the vagrant's arm. The blond man managed to dodge the grab, and took another step back; the patroller would have to lunge through Hawke's personal space in order to try again, which he wasn't prepared to do quite yet. "He has outstanding warrants from seven different stations, including a prior on Kirkwall." 

"I'm just passing through," the vagrant said in a sullen tone. "Another few days and I'll be off the station like you never saw me. What good's it to you to keep me longer?" 

"It's about respect for the law!" the patroller snapped back. 

"Let me guess," Hawke said in a bored tone, even as he went to pull up the information on his own HUD. A quick hack over into the patroller's database brought up the same record he was looking at, including a name, a serial number, and a list of physicals. Same blood type as his own, Hawke noted. "Five counts of loitering, two of public indecency? What'd he do, piss in a vent?" 

The man -- Anders -- snorted, but the patroller looked even less amused. "Nothing so innocent," he said darkly. "Fraud, resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, recusal of bail, economic terrorism, assault, aid and comfort, theft, arson, illegal manipulation of an Orlesian duchess --" 

Indeed, the list went on for half a page. Hawke read on in growing amazement. "Oh wow," he said, feigning astonishment. "All those charges against one skinny guy?  _ Really?" _

"Yes, really," the patroller snapped. "Now stand aside, or --"

"Well, that's funny," Hawke said, letting his mouth run on automatic while his brainware ran through the database with a proverbial scythe. "Because I think you're wrong. I don't think he has any charges against him  _ at all." _

He got to watch the patroller's expression change -- jaw dropping, eyes widening, lips going slack -- as the changes Hawke made to the database filtered back down to his own faceplate. "What -- how did you just -- you tampered with the records! That's illegal!" 

"What's illegal?" Hawke said in innocent tone. "The only illegal thing I see here is an armed officer of the law harassing two completely  _ innocent _  gentlemen out on a walk in a public area."

"This is obstruction of justice!" the patroller fumed. "You can't do this and -- and expect to get away with it!"

"Wrong again!" Hawke said, giving a cheery wave. "Rutherford, my man, don't you ever get  _ tired _ of being so wrong?"

"You won't be the Viscount's pet hacker forever, Hawke," the patroller said, pitching his voice low and venomous. "And when that day comes --"

"When that day comes," Hawke interrupted him, "I won't feel any need to stay on the  _ good side _  of obnoxious two-cred rent-a-cops that think they can tell me what to day." He waggled his fingers at the patroller in a dismissive manner. "Guess we've both got that day to look forward to, huh?"

The patroller reached for his silencer, a furious look on his face -- but was arrested mid-motion by a buzzer going off in his helmet that Hawke could hear even from the outside. Falling back a step, Rutherford began to mutter quickly in response to his commandant -- Hawke didn't even need to tap the channel to guess what was going on, since he'd been the one to mark the patroller as AOD in the system in the first place. With one more fulminating glare at Hawke -- and Anders too -- the patroller turned and hurried off. 

He turned to his new stray with his most charming smile, a lopsided grin that twisted up one corner of his mouth in a roguish manner. "So," he said, and held out his hand palm-up. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. I mean, I read your dossier, but that's all a bit one-sided. I'm Garrett, and I'm a hacker." 

"Anders," the man said, a wry smile on his list as he shook Hawke's hand. "And I'm a bum. Thanks for the help back there. Although I meant it, really, I'm just passing through. You didn't need to go to such lengths to --" 

"Eh," Hawke said, passing it off with a shrug as though it physically rolled off his shoulder. "Messing with the Templars is a favored hobby of mine. If you don't set boundaries with these guys, they run right over you." 

"That's true," Anders said with a sigh. "Though in my experience, they just run over you anyway." 

"So how'd you acquire such an astounding list of crimes?" Hawke inquired. 

"Oh, well..." Anders shifted uncomfortably. "Only a few of them were really actually crimes. The rest of them are just things the courts throw at you to rack up the sentence length and try to sound intimidating." 

"Sure." Hawke waved his fingers, allowing this. He was well aware of how the legal system worked, more by attrition and dogged persistence than any real righteousness. "But... an Orlesian Duchess?" 

Anders laughed. "Okay,  _ that  _ one was real," he said. "It's a long story."

He'd gotten a laugh. Good. Encouraged, Hawke went on; "But seriously, if the justice system is that pissed off at you, you must have done something good." 

"Or something bad..." Anders said. 

"Bad? You? Surely not," Hawke said dramatically. "Look, the law and I are not always exactly on the same side, remember? C'mon, let's have the _goods._ What'd you do to tweak their noses so bad?" 

The remnants of the earlier laugh still tugged the corners of Anders' mouth upwards, crinkling the corners of his eyes; but the smile slowly faded as a shadow settled over his face. "Doing triage during the Amaranthine protests," Anders said. 

 _"You_  were at Amaranthine?" Hawke said, astonished. "During the riots --"  

"-- protests," Anders corrected him meticulously. "And yeah... I was there. Street medic. They needed one." 

Hawke's estimation of Anders courage -- and his conviction -- went up several notches. He'd heard of street medics, who attended protest actions in order to provide first aid and medical care to those who were injured in the line of fire, often denied official intervention by the authorities on site. They were as much at risk as any of the protestors of being gassed, beaten, or even shot -- perhaps more so, as there were no Geneva Convention strictures attending street riots, and so targeting medics was not a war crime. How, after all, could it be a war crime when there was no war? 

"I'm more surprised that you know the truth about what happened at Amaranthine at all," Anders remarked. "The media did a bang-up job of not covering it, or only reporting the spin." 

"Hacker, remember?" Hawke said a touch smugly. "We don't have to rely on the media's spin for anything. If it's in our interests, we'll find out. Somehow." 

"And this is in your interest?" Anders challenged him. 

 _You are very much in my interest,_  popped to Hawke's lips, but he managed to swallow the fatuousness before it escaped him. Instead, "Of course it was. Any hacker would be. Did you know that the Amaranthine suppression was the first live-fire testing of the VK's prototype heuristic enhancement package?"  

"No," Anders said, "but I can't say I'm surprised." 

"Sure, there are militaries all over the galaxy that try to beef up their soldiers' reflexes with cybernetics, but this was the real thing -- practically a ride-along veteran soldier in your brainware. Next-generation learning capacity, burnt-in core law-keeping directives -- it was damn near the next thing to a true artificial intelligence. Of _course_  any hacker would be interested -- true AI is the holy grail of the programming community!"  

"Prototype military cybernetics? In a _civilian_  engagement?" Anders demanded.   His outrage sounded a bit feeble, Hawke thought.

"I guess they have to test it somewhere," Hawke shrugged. "Civilian-side firefights are lower risk than getting it out in the field only to have it go wrong. 

"I suppose," Anders said, his voice flat and colorless. "At the time this was happening, I was elbows deep in trying to save a woman's arm that had been burned to the bone from a flash grenade, so I have a slightly different perspective." 

"...Right. Of course you would." Hawke said, cringing back at how insensitive he was being. "I mean, it's fucked up. It's fucked up that they were even there in the first place, even without bringing in military tech. Everyone who knows anything about Amaranthine knows that." 

Anders didn't say anything. Hawke tried, desperately, to find some way past the conversational pit. "Even the military _computers_  know it was fucked up," he said. "Did you know that halfway through the massacre, an entire cybernetic intelligence went on the fritz? Their idiot commander tried to force it to use lethal fire against unarmed civilians, and _of course_  that violated its core directives. Only instead of freezing up or going into a shutdown, it overloaded the control linkages and downloaded itself onto the local network."  

"It escaped onto the extranet?!" Anders startled out of his flat affect. "How could they have allowed that to happen?" 

"That's the thing! It _shouldn't_  have been able to," Hawke exclaimed, the enthusiasm returning to his voice. "They had it on an entirely link-local network, no outside channels at all. To prevent just this sort of outloading from happening. The only places the program _could_  have gone were to another unit on the network.  

"Or to any other hackers who were leeching off the network, of course. But since there would be no record of that... it could be anyone. Could be anywhere. The greatest advancement in computer intelligence in our century has gone rogue, and absolutely nobody has any idea where it went. If you were at Amaranthine, you might even have _seen_  it. Well, not exactly seen anything, but you might have been _there_  when it happened. Do you think there's any chance that -- "  

Anders was rubbing his forehead; all the animation had faded out of his face, leaving him once more the grubby, lined, worn-down street drifter that the patroller had been harassing. "I'd -- I'd really rather not talk about it any more, if you don't mind," Anders said, his voice strained. 

"All right," Hawke said. Once the mania of his own particular special interest was passing off, he was increasingly kicking himself for pressing Anders about what was obviously a painful memory. "Look. Sorry about that. Do you have a place to stay around here?" 

Anders shrugged. "There's usually a quiet space under the pipes," he said. "Like I told the patroller, I'm only going to be on Kirkwall for a few more days." 

"Right," Hawke said. "Tell you what, you can crash at my place if you want. It's not much, but I have a couch." _And food,_  he added silently. The gaunt look on Anders' face certainly called for that.   

"Oh, smooth." Anders' eyebrows went up. "You're not very good at this 'pick-up' thing, are you?" he asked, and if he sounded sarcastic at least he didn't look quite so grey.

"No," Hawke admitted. "Usually if it's someone I help, they have their own place to stay. And if it's someone I want to have a good time with, there's plenty of one-hour motels on the upper levels to stay in." He practically kept a second residence there for the one he used to meet Isabela when she was in town, not that he'd seen her for a good six months.

"Oh? And which category do I fit into?" Anders said, and Hawke smiled, one side of his mouth quirking up in a familiar reckless, fuck-with-it smile.

"I haven't decided yet," he said. "But I'd like to find out."

 

* * *

 

 

"Here we are," Hawke announced, the door sliding open to admit the two of them into his flat. "Home sweet home. Go ahead and plug yourself in, I've opened up the firewall to you." 

Anders shuffled around a bit in his peripheral vision, and Hawke saw an icon light up in the corner of his HUD as a new status appeared on his home network. Information began to flow between host and guest computers, although the flow was sluggish, intermittent. 

"Sorry about that," Anders said apologetically, catching Hawke's expression. "I... don't have a whole lot of processing time to spare." 

Hawke nodded sympathetically. The law required that all galactic citizens be outfitted with a basic cybernetic brain suite from birth, but not all brainware was created equal. Hawke had come from a good enough family that his had been decent to start, before he'd spent a fortune on upgrades -- but for many people, the computers in their heads were barely enough to handle basic runtime processes or run a cheap vid or two. Whatever sad story had led Anders to a life of interstellar vagrancy...  "Low-grader, huh?" 

Anders shrugged, looking faintly uncomfortable; Hawke couldn't blame him. "I get by," he said at last, and Hawke delicately dropped the subject. 

"I don't really have a guest room as such," he said. "But the couch is comfy enough -- just shove over some of those boxes. Here, I'll move the loose panels…" He got to work in a hurry tidying up, shuffling a half-dozen loose pieces of circuitry and twice as many data storage chips carelessly into a plastic bin, which he shoved out of sight on the closest shelf. 

The low sofa, sitting across from the vid-plate, was not exactly pristine. Hawke made a futile attempt to brush crumbs off the couch only to discover that it was not crumbs, but the curled ridges of the synthetic-plastic fabric where his welder had scorched it. Giving up, he threw a sheet over the abrasions -- was the sheet clean? Who knew? -- and stuffed a few loose shirts into a bag to make a pillow. "Feel free to use the bathroom, it's got a shower; as long as you don't mind me using the toilet when you're in there. Hope that doesn't shock you."

Anders gave him a wry smile. "I spent six months in a barracks with five other Wardens," he said. "I doubt there's much left that can shock me."

Six months, was it? That was an interesting time frame; too long for any kind of visit or tour, but too short for any actual military deployment term. Hawke added it to his store of information about his guest.

"You can have anything in the kitchen," Hawke continued his tour, such as it was. "There's a quick-chiller and a hot plate. Mostly nutra-bars and stim drinks, but they're filling as shit; if you get in the mood for something else I can order takeout."

"Well," Anders said, a faint smile on his face as he gazed around the little apartment, "you weren't just being humble earlier, when you said it wasn't much."

Hawke shrugged, feeling only the faintest embarrassment. "It's all I need, for the most part," he said. "I could get a bigger place if I wanted, better part of the station, best views of the docks -- but what would I do with more room?"

Anders took a slow circuit of the flat, looking around. There really wasn't much too it aside from the two small rooms and the sofa; Hawke's workstation took up the other half of the big room, an array of monitors and input stations surrounding a grav couch. It was practically a life support module in itself, meant to keep Hawke stable when he spent long hours engaged with his brainware, trawling the extranet with little to no awareness of his surroundings. He slept there, too, when he slept at all. 

It made Hawke feel strange -- gave him an uneasy twist in his stomach -- to have someone else here, in his private sanctuary. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd brought Anders here, instead of just setting him up in a motel room for however long he wanted.

But as dismal and utilitarian as the surroundings were, there was no disgust or disdain in Anders' eyes -- no judgment at all.

"Med packet?" Hawke offered. He pulled one of the case on the wall and offered it over. A flicker of need, almost  _ hunger, _  passed over the stranger's face and was gone; he accepted the medicine with a murmur of thanks.

The standard load of cyberenhancements that every citizen was given -- aside from the brain networking hardware that most received soon after birth -- included an onboard medbot, a medical program that monitored each person's physiological state and made adjustments or recommendations when injury or illness threatened. 

Most programs were able to mitigate excessive emotive spikes, like panic reactions, and alleviate unhealthy levels of stress; they were also able to release medications into the bloodstream, painkillers or tranquilizers, at need. But that was only possible if the medbot was supplied with all the necessary medications on a regular basis, and med packets were very nearly a currency of their own these days.

Anders made a surprised little noise as his system registered the med packet; the noise bypassed all of Hawke's usual cool defenses and shot straight down his spine. Anders looked up at Hawke, raising his eyebrows. "This is some high-quality medication," he said. "Hospital-grade, if I'm not mistaken."

"You aren't," Hawke said, a little smugly.

"It's not stolen, is it?" Anders said, sounding a little worried.

Hawke feigned outrage, putting a hand over his chest. "You wound me! As though I'd ever do something so low-life as to  _ steal…. _  From a hospital, anyway," he snickered. "No, really. Don't worry, it's legit. It costs top dollar, but I figure if you're going to be putting it in your bloodstream, it's worth getting the best you can afford."

"And you can afford the best?"

"Hey," Hawke said. "This place may not look fancy, but I've got resources. What I need, I can get, one way or another. Money isn't an issue for me."

"Must be nice," Anders muttered, and Hawke felt a flash of guilt.

"I just meant to say," he said, his voice more subdued. "Don't worry about putting me out, or taking too much of my supplies, or anything like that, okay? You can have whatever you need. If the Amell name is good for anything, it gets me good deals." 

Anders wheeled to face him, eyes wide. "Amell?" he exclaimed. "You're Garrett _Amell?_  As in, _Hawke?"_  

Oh shit, had he not introduced himself before? Hawke quickly reran their first exchanges -- no, he hadn't, had he? Off-balance, he tried to play it for drama. "That's me!" Hawke said, giving him a lopsided smile and a sweeping bow, one hand held grandiosely over his heart.

Anders was still staring at him as though he'd sprouted a second head. "But you're the _Champion_  of _Kirkwall,"_  he uttered in disbelief. "You can't -- I can't -- why would you -- but you're a hero! Why would you bother with someone like -- you literally _saved_  the station, back during the Qunari invasion. It was all over the news!"  

"Yeah," Hawke said, although the smile faded. "That was me."

Of course Kirkwall didn't have a standing army. It barely had a government. All the armed forces stationed at Kirkwall were patchwork divisions of the disparate interests that lived and worked and squatted there. There was an enervated, overworked municipal guard; a contingent of Holy Templars guarding the station's High Chantry; armed security for the various trading groups, mostly contracted from more-or-less reputable mercenary companies; and, of course, the illicit and variously armed enforcers for the Coterie, the Carta, and a handful of other gangs struggling for territory. 

If there was peace to be found on Kirkwall Station it came mostly from uneasy cease-fires between parties not willing to risk a loss of profit. The guards mostly ignored the gangs, the Templars did not interfere with the mercenaries. But the ramshackle station was home to them all, and on the day the Qunari invasion began they all rose as one in defense of their home. 

 Including the hackers. As was standard in any kind of intra-ship warfare, the Qunari began their assault by releasing a vicious computer virus into their systems, which locked out and froze up most of the turret defenses. Qunari computer coding was powerful, deeply disciplined and tightly encrypted, and the station engineers had been helpless to free the turrets as the Qunari fleet closed in. 

The hacker community, with Hawke in the lead, had stepped in to battle the Qunari cybervirus as bravely as the corporate shuttles fought dreadnoughts off the bow, as fiercely as the Coterie _bratjas_ fought Qunari shock troops in the airlock corridors. In the critical instant, with mere seconds to spare, Hawke had regained control of the turrets from the Qunari invaders and turned it on their enemies, blowing an entire wave of boarding shuttles into atoms. That moment had marked the turn of the tide, and many vicious, bloody hours later the Qunari had retreated in defeat.  

It was a great victory, an epic legend that spread throughout the Nexus -- but it had not come without a cost. 

"Being a hero isn't all parades and whiskey, unfortunately," Hawke said with a shrug. He pressed his hand against his face, the left side, where the brainware overload had left his nerves burnt and dead. "But, you know, the alternative was to be blown out into space with the rest of Kirkwall. Or dragged off to a Qunari indoctrination camp. Either way -- yeah, no. It's not really that hard to fight when you're doing it for your fuckin' life." 

He couldn't stop the bitterness that edged last few words, and gave himself a stern shake. So he'd come out of it with a few nicks and scratches; others had had much worse that day. 

"You can say that," Anders said quietly, "but it _is_  too hard for most people, which is why it takes a rare man to stand up and fight. Make no mistake, you _are_  a hero, Garrett Amell; you saved ten thousand lives that day and you kept on saving lives afterwards. I just don't see why someone as important as you would bother with someone like me."  

"If there's any damn thing that comes with being named 'Champion' that's worth a burnt shit," Hawke said sharply, "it's that I can do pretty much whatever the fuck I want. Nobody tries to tell me what to do. Well, they _try,_  but I get to ignore'em. So if I want to pick up a pretty stranger off the street and show them all the wonders of my shitty bachelor apartment -- I can do that."  

Anders sputtered, and when Hawke looked over, his face had gone red. "Pretty?" he said in a strangled voice. 

"Well." Hawke cleared his throat awkwardly. "Some would say so, yes. I'd be one of 'em. It's that whole... sexy tortured fugitive look you've got going. It really brings out your eyes." 

Anders laughed, and Hawke brightened. It was a good sign, he was sure, when people laughed when you called them sexy. 

"Well," Anders said, and that smile that made his eyes dance was back again. "All right. If nobody gets to tell you what to do, then I won't even try. And if you're willing to take a chance on me -- then I'll just have to do my best to make it a chance worth taking." 

Anders took a step closer, and Hawke met him halfway. It was a small apartment, but they didn't even make it to his bed. That was fine; the couch was sturdy enough, anyway.

Kirkwall was a station with no sun, no central source of warmth and light and energy, no gravity to pull planets and satellites into an endless gavotte. But for the first time here in the deep blackness of space -- subtly and slightly at first, then tugged along with increasing, inexorable momentum -- Hawke found himself beginning to fall.

 

* * *

 

 

Anders was still there the next morning. And the next day, and the next night. Hawke gave him a key card to his apartment via the storage units, so that he could come and go discreetly, and he ended up staying the next several nights after that. 

Gradually, Anders' presence began making itself known in his little flat; not in any overt way, but here and there in ways he couldn't fail to notice. Littered drink pouches and food wrapped scattered on the floor and work surfaces vanished, and the dishes stacked haphazardly under the drain acquired a new level of brightness. He never moved any of Hawke's stuff -- for which Hawke was grateful; he had a system for storing everything, and wouldn't be able to find what he needed if it was out of place -- but everything gradually became less and less coated with grime.   


"I can't help it," Anders protested when Hawke asked him about this, not that Hawke had exactly been looking for an apology. "It's the medic in me -- I just like things to be hygenic." 

Hawke liked the overall effect too, he had to admit. But he liked having Anders there more. 

They didn't spend all their time together -- Hawke had his own projects, and Anders seemed to drift in and out on errands of his own -- but it was still easy to get arrested in Anders' orbit, fall into his presence. Often it was making out on his couch -- or more -- hot and sweaty and fumbling for his store of long-neglected prophylactics taped to the bottom of the table. 

But just as often it was long, meandering conversations that ate the hours away without Hawke even realizing where the time had gone. Anders was a good conversationalist, witty and bright when he wanted to be, matching Hawke terrible joke for terrible joke. But he also had depths to him that Hawke hadn't expected, and when the conversation turned to politics he could talk eloquently and with force about details of politics, both local and galactic, that Hawke only paid marginal attention to. 

Hawke came back from a drinks run one evening to find Anders watching a news vid, his face hard and set and his hands clenched on the edge of the table. 

"What's all this about?" Hawke asked. 

In answer Anders turned up the volume on the vid, and Hawke turned to watch. It was a Chantry news bulletin -- he'd actually seen it earlier today, but as it didn't impact any of his friends or interests directly, had largely disregarded it. 

The Chantry regularly ran sent out an Exalted Fleet to make the rounds of known space, mostly just hopping through each rift and touching down for a few days at whatever port was on the other side. Supposedly to spread the Song of Andraste throughout all known space, it was primarily a reminder of their presence and power to those systems that were only marginally under Chantry control. 

To ensure their welcome the Chantry went all out to put a good face on the process; they spent lavishly, both on outfitting the Exalted Fleet itself and also on publicists for each leg of the tour. As a goodwill gesture, the Grand Cleric made carefully choreographed, highly publicized visits to the poorer and more run-down areas of each system she visited, including much-publicized donations of aid to a few carefully vetted individuals. All theater and show, nothing really substantive in any way, but Hawke didn't really see the problem with it. 

"The fleet docks in Kirkwall Station in two days," Anders said, his voice low. "They'll board the station the day after, and then they'll be here. _She'll_  be here, the Grand Cleric."  

"Elthina?" Hawke asked, startled. "What's the problem with her? What'd she do?"

Anders stared at the vid screen, jaw set so tight the tendons stood out along his cheeks. "Nothing," he said. 

"Oh, c'mon," Hawke said. "I mean, I can see you're upset --"

"No," Anders interrupted. "I'm saying she did  _ nothing. _ That's the problem."

Hawke tried to parse that. "You're gonna have to unpack that one for me," he said finally.

"Elthina was the Chantry liaison for the Planasene habitats," Anders started. "The residents used to call it the Gallows, because everyone knew it was a fucking death trap."

"The Gallows?" Hawke repeated, startled. "Wasn't that the habitat that took a total systems crash a few years ago?"

"Yes," Anders said. "Hull breach, and the interlocks failed to close. Four thousand deaths, a thousand more suffered permanent brain and nerve damage."

"She was in charge of  _ that?" _  Hawke was calling up the datanet entry on the incident even as he spoke. OUR THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE WITH THE PEOPLE OF PLANASENE, scrolled the headline on the Chantry news bulletin. "Wait, wait, I see her name here. It looks like she was investigated, but declared innocent -- the safety systems were ten years behind on maintenance cycles, and the investigating crew decided in the end that she had no knowledge of how bad the equipment had gotten."

"Do you have any idea how hard she had to work to have  _ no knowledge _ of how bad it had gotten?" Anders demanded. "The engineering companies were siphoning off the essential maintenance fund for their own profits -- everybody knew it was going on. The station liaison was  _ supposed _  to be the outside party the residents could appeal to for help. They tried to tell her -- they  _ tried. _  Citizen watchdog groups submitted seventeen petitions to her office.  _ Seventeen. _  Every one of them was rejected by the gatekeeping system and returned unread.

"Towards the end it was getting so bad, people tried more drastic measures. One artistic type wrote it in fifty-foot high letters in promethium on the side of the outside station wall on a day she was scheduled to pass through. Nice idea, but no accountability -- she could simply say she hadn't seen anything. Another reporter broke past three lines of security during a press conference in order to shout the information at her through a loudspeaker, and play it on high-def LED video screen at the same time. Do you know what she did? She turned off her auditory receptors, and turned to look at the wall until security had removed them."

"That's... appalling." Hawke shook his head, not so much in disbelief or rejection. "And she gets another cushy post on a luxury cruise liner doing goodwill tours right after? There's no justice in this galaxy."

Anders was silent for a long moment, and Hawke got up to take the abandoned dinner dishes over to the cleaner. Anders really was rubbing off on him, he reflected. He was halfway out of the room before Anders' voice came from behind him:  "Do you really believe that?" 

"Believe what? That Elthina is a worthless limp rag?" Hawke turned around, raising an eyebrow. "Absolutely, yes." 

"About justice," Anders said, his voice low and taut. "That there's no such thing as justice." 

He sounded serious -- raw, even -- and Hawke paused a moment, took an unaccustomed moment to think about his answer instead of just tossing off a witty remark. "I don't know. That's a tough question for someone like me. What I do is against the law, pretty definitively. But I do it to help people, for the most part, and make the world better. Can there be justice in a system that would shut people like me down for the profits and pocketbooks of narrow-minded corporate interests?" 

"I'm not talking about laws, though," Anders said. "Men make laws, and like anything else men makes, they can be good or bad. But justice is something else. Something independent of manmade laws, something higher." 

"You mean like, the idea of Heaven or Hell?" Hawke said dubiously. Anders hadn't struck him as the theistic sort, although you never knew; he'd been a soldier of sorts, once, and in his experience soldiers were more likely to be believers. "An almighty God that presides over the afterlife and sends you to paradise or eternal suffering based on your deeds in life?" 

"No. Although that idea is a part of it." Anders grimaced. "But that's a fantasy made by men, too, to try to comfort themselves with the idea that bad people will be punished eventually even if they never have the power to make it happen in this life. To comfort themselves with the idea that _someone_  out there cares about them, even if no one in this life ever will.  

"But that isn't what I meant. I meant something that exists independent of us, not something that men make. If that's all it is, then what makes one man's justice more true than any other man's? Who gets to decide truth? Does righteousness belong to the man with the most money? The most power?" He shook his head. "I have to believe that there's more out there than that. That justice exists out there, somewhere, whether we choose to believe it or not." 

Hawke shrugged. "It's a nice idea, but it can't be true. You could search all over the galaxy and you'd never find justice physically in any planet or star. No trace amounts of justice-gas found in ring giants or solar clouds." He paused, a little taken aback by how passionate his words had run. "If it's not man-made, and it's not nature-found, then where would it come from?" 

"I don't know, but it _must_ exist," Anders said passionately. "It must still be there even when men don't believe in it, or don't act on it, or don't care. That there is a higher goal to which we aspire, which makes us more whole. That there is a right and a wrong beyond the petty self-interests of men." 

"I'd like to think that," Hawke said wistfully. Remembering an older self, a more innocent time, when he'd believed that he really _could_  right the wrongs of the world, when he hadn't come to accept the dirty nature of the world he lived in as a fact.  

"So would I," Anders said softly. "So would I."

 

* * *

 

 

It was less of a surprise than it should have been when, the next morning, Anders was gone. 

It was less of a surprise than it should have been when he didn't come back. 

It was less of a surprise than it should have been, perhaps, when the next time he saw Anders was on the news the next day. 

The cameras rolled on Grand Cleric Elthina as she made landfall from her private yacht onto Kirkwall Station; crowds of cheering citizens lined the gangway as she walked sedately past, one hand raised in benediction and two acolytes following to manager her train. The scene was shot from many angles, but only one of them caught the grim, purposeful motion through the crowd as the shabbily dressed, tow-headed man plowed determinedly forward through the mass of people. 

He was unarmed, of course. No one had been allowed on the causeway without first being scanned for weapons. But there were some things that the scanners would not know how to detect, and as the security guards grabbed the man advancing up to the barrier, Hawke watched his lover begin to glow. 

Wires and circuits lit from within with an eerie, actinic blue light; it crawled up the implants in his neck and spilled out his ports, his eyes, his hands. He tossed the security aside like dolls and broke effortlessly through the barrier, making a beeline for Elthina. 

All the cameras were on him by then -- but by then, it was too late. 

Hawke watched the man he'd been falling in love with punch a clean hole through the Grand Cleric, in full view of half the cameras on Kirkwall Station, and no matter how he searched himself he couldn't find surprise; only a dull, numb sort of horror.

 

* * *

 

 

He got away afterwards, and no one was sure how. Not Kirkwall's municipal guard, not the Templar cyberneticists, and not Hawke; the hacking Anders had done of the security computers was so thorough and clean that even he couldn't find the edges of it. Inhuman, Hawke thought. Was pretty sure. 

Hawke had gone back to clean the last traces of Anders' presence from his own home network -- not without misgivings, but if he was planning to go on living on Kirkwall Station, there was no other choice. By the time he got there, Anders had already done the job. There was no hint of trail leading to his apartment, no hint of where he'd gone after; there was scarcely a sign that he'd ever been there at all. 

The profile he'd requested from the Amaranthine Wardens had come back to him, finally; Hawke felt bile filling up in his mouth as he read down the long list of cybernetic enhancements that had been done on Warden Anders. Low-grade brainware, _ha;_  before he'd left the Wardens, Anders had been equipped with some of the most up-to-date, most expensive cybernetic implants Hawke had seen outside of a research lab. But then again, an instance of cutting-edge AI would just about have taken up all of that power just to keep running.  

He drank himself to sleep that night, and the night after, feeling no surprise, only bitter frustration and dull regret. 

"I wish you had never come here," Hawke said aloud to the empty apartment, so much emptier now than it had ever been when he was alone. "But if you had to come, I wish you hadn't left."

 

* * *

 

 

Only a week later, when Hawke finally got around to tidying up the last of the trash and mess left behind in his apartment -- with no other occupant, there seemed less reason than ever to bother -- did he find it. 

It was a cheap paper napkin, stained on one side from grease and hot sauce. But the other side was still clean, and as Hawke turned it over his eyes fell on a network address, in plaintext, written in handwriting that was not his own. 

Hawke sat on the battered sofa, staring down at the napkin in his hand, for many long minutes. And he wondered:   


Was it enough for a man to know that justice was real? That it did exist out there, _somewhere,_  with a pulse and a breath and a body, fighting to right the wrongs that no one else would, to avenge the lives that otherwise went unmourned? Was it enough just to _know,_  or in knowing, did it call on you to act -- to be a better man, a stronger man, no matter how it hurt?  

And knowing that justice came with honey eyes and a warm, crooked smile -- with arms that could enfold all the galaxy and a heart that beat with every hurt -- did that knowing make this better, or worse? 

In a sudden spasm of anger he crumpled the napkin in his hand, the fragile paper ripping slightly under his nails. 

He got up, carefully straightened it out again, and set the paper in a safe place on his desk. 

Another day. He'd decide. Another day.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

> C:\Users\hawke>ping 2606:6000:6517:5200:5209:59ff:fe7b:71fd/64 -t
> 
>  
> 
> Pinging  [2606:6000:6517:5200:5209:59ff:fe7b:71fd/64] with 32 bytes of data:
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Request timed out.
> 
> Reply from 2606:6000:6517:5200:5209:59ff:fe7b:71fd/64 time=11095ms
> 
> Reply from 2606:6000:6517:5200:5209:59ff:fe7b:71fd/64 time=10157ms

 

* * *

 

 

~end.


End file.
